Censorship 101

A few years ago, the Houston Astros won the American League pennant and the World Series. Baseball writers lavished praise on the effectiveness of the Houston system in producing winning teams. A couple of years later the baseball world was shocked to discover that the Astros had been cheating.

Now, fast forward to the 2020 Presidential election. The claims that President Trump has made about cheating or fraud in the election have been routinely dismissed as dubious and without evidence. Typically, news outlets do not investigate the claims but just say that they have been dismissed by judges and state officials and settle for that.

The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal agrees, even though to my knowledge, its news pages have never conducted an investigation into the voting irregularities and anomalies in the key battleground states.

However, things have gone a step further since protestors stormed the Capitol on January 6. Just talking about fraud in the past election has been elevated to speech that must be suppressed as seditious and tending to insurrection. In a recent op-ed in my local newspaper, a teacher at Connecticut’s Pace University argued that it was right and proper for social media sites to censor and suppress claims of fraud. 

Of course, he lauded the ban on President Trump’s social media accounts. He compared President Trump to Hitler claiming that he used his social media platform to advance a “Big Lie” strategy. He did believe that censorship should only be a short-term solution and argued that in the future social media and other news sources should insist that posts or tweets by politicians be accompanied by equal length contrary posts.

One wonders where the Pace prof. has been the past four years. During his term in office President Trump spawned a whole industry of fact checkers who closely scrutinized his every word. I suspect that these “fact checkers” will soon be filing unemployment claims since the new administration will likely be above reproach or criticism.

Moreover, I wonder if the professor even reads the newspaper in which his op-ed appeared. Like many other news organizations, the CT Post has a diverse group of political columnists but despite differences in color and gender they are all of the same opinion, especially when it came to the Trump administration. Even the political cartoons were invariably anti-Trump. 

Op-ed pages in newspapers were originally designed to provide opposing points of view, but no more. Over the past four years the great majority of guest opinion pieces have generally supported the paper’s editorial positions. For a while, the paper had a “You Said it” column where readers could provide short responses to editorials or generally voice their opinion. But that has largely disappeared.

The Pace prof. was just mirroring the thoughts of many Trump haters throughout the nation. He calls for reasoned discourse and the sharing of opinions but where has it been in the past four years?

Finally, have the people who believe that there is no evidence for fraud in the past election, and dismiss such claims as dubious, forgotten the claims of fraud and Russian collusion in the 2016 election? The fact that these claims were spawned by a dubious document put forward by Democratic political operatives did not stop them from calling for incessant investigation. The $40 Million Mueller investigation that ensued found no evidence to support these dubious claims. Nevertheless, many still believe that Trump stole the election of 2016. Did any professor ever speak out against this hoax or call for censorship then?

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Quote of the day: 

"Badges! We don’t need no stinkin badges!" Mexican bandit in Treasure of Sierra Madre.